


My Need is Such, I Pretend Too Much

by boopinbabbit



Series: Nuclear Heart [3]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: Avoidant Personality Disorder, Character Study, Confidance Man subplot, Deacon is dragged kicking and screaming into the mortifying ordeal of being known, Deacon's PoV, F/M, Friendship, Gen, Genderqueer Character, M/M, Multi, Non-Chronological, Nonbinary Character, Past Character Death, Piper Wright is Done With This Shit, Platonic Relationships, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Reverse Chronology, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Vadim Boborov's bad decisions, or as Deacon likes to call it: spicy nostalgia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-08
Updated: 2021-01-08
Packaged: 2021-03-18 16:09:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28620837
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/boopinbabbit/pseuds/boopinbabbit
Summary: confidence man (n.): a person who swindles others by way of a confidence game; see con-artist.or, Deacon can only do nice things for friends while heavily intoxicated.[Companion piece to "But Babe I Need the Thrill" set between chapters 16 and 18]
Relationships: Barbara/Deacon (Fallout), Deacon & Robert Joseph MacCready, Deacon/Female Sole Survivor, Minor or Background Relationship(s), Past Relationships - Relationship, Robert Joseph MacCready/Lucy (Fallout), Robert Joseph MacCready/Strong, Travis Miles/Scarlett (Fallout)
Series: Nuclear Heart [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1129805
Kudos: 3





	My Need is Such, I Pretend Too Much

If Deacon had to pinpoint the exact moment this whole mess went completely pear-shaped, they’d say it was probably the day Mama Bobrov popped out a second son. Yefim had to have hogged all the brain cells in the womb, because it’s clear his brother doesn’t have any.

Three bottles into a downward spiral of their own is not where Deacon wants to be while hunting raiders, but they’ve never claimed to be a paragon of brilliant decisions. See: every single one they’ve ever made in the history of forever starting with getting themself shot in the head as a kid to involving themself in a super mutant’s sex life.

Never mind the fact that the person Strong’s having sex with is one the few people Deacon can actually, and with near-complete sincerity, call a friend. Maccready may be an annoying pain in the ass, but he’s an annoying pain in the ass Deacon has known since childhood. They’ve been through a lot of shit together (most of which has been, admittedly, Deacon’s fault), and unfortunately give a shit about each other.

This doesn’t make Deacon any more qualified to give Strong a shovel talk, but they’d given it their best regardless. With an actual shovel, no less. Lucy would’ve been proud.

“She’d’ve pr’lly liked you,” Deacon mumbles, hand clenched into the back of the dress they’d stitched together for Strong’s “Great Auntie Bertha” disguise. It’d gotten them past Diamond City security with barely a double-take, which is even more worrying for that city’s prosperity than their mayor’s probable synth replacement. What had Deacon been talking about? Oh, right. “That girl was always ten pounds’ a crazy in a five pound sack. Pr’tty sure Mac’s gotta type…”

“What Nobody whispering about?” Strong grunts, twisting slightly to glare down at them. “Should be helping find stupid barman.”

“Has Maccready ever told’ya ‘bout his wife?”

“Loo-see. Yes. Puny Gunner tell Strong about Loo-see.”

They trudge together in silence for a few moments before Strong continues in a soft tone Deacon’s never heard out of an East Coast mutant before.

“Make him sad, so, he not tell Strong much. But…enough.”

“I knew her too,” Deacon says. Strong stops, causing them to run into his back. The world tilts in a very not-good way before thankfully righting itself.

“Nobody and Puny Gunner brothers, right?”

“Ah, no. We ain’t….er, no wait, y’mean like comrades, dontcha? Yeah, uh, sorta?” Deacon stumbles over their words nearly as bad as their feet. This is not a conversation they should be having drunk (this is a conversation they can _only_ be having drunk). “We…we go way back.”

“Back where?”

“A long, long time ago. In a galaxy far…far away…”

Strong huffs over their sudden laughter. “Nobody not making sense. If wanting talk, then talk. If not then not.”

“If only it were that easy,” Deacon mourns, reaching up to tug on the locks of their current disguise. Up ahead, Scarlett and Travis argue over which direction to take this eclectic train wreck of a rescue party. Hopefully the dumbass raiders holding Vadim for ransom aren’t in a very big hurry, because following these two lovebirds is going to take a while.

“Doubt they last past the first night,” Deacon tells an obviously uninterested Strong, gesturing up towards the other pair. “False confidence can only get you so far, and once that wears off, Scarlett’s gonna realize she deserves better.”

Not that they’re speaking from experience or anything (except they totally are), but Deacon’s had a few relationships in their life and the common denominator for screwing them up has been the other person finding out the truth.

Which truth? Pick one. Hell, pick several. Go for broke like Barbara had and-

A large green hand reaches back, and Deacon finds themself jerked around to Strong’s side just in time to spot the raiders surging towards them.

“Thank fuck for dues ex distraction, huh?” They ask, reaching past their skirt for the gun strapped to their thigh. Aiming while their vision does its best impression of an old world funhouse mirror is basically impossible, but Deacon manages to get a food good shots off anyway. Good thing they dumped all their stats into Accuracy. Too bad about that low Constitution though, eh, junkie?

Too bad about a lot of things, really. Up to and including the fact that Deacon’s gun runs out of bullets long before they run out of raiders, and he left his spares back in the city. This is why you don’t drink and fight, folks! Melee has never been Deacon’s strong suit, no matter how many people tried to literally beat it into them, but he’s forced to give it his best anyways.

Strong, on the other hand, is a powerhouse of hard muscle and even harder punches capable of knocking even the most hopped-up-on-psycho raiders down and out. He tears through them like piñatas, blood and viscera staining his dress in crimson and completely ruining any chance of salvaging that cloth for something else.

One of the felled raiders gives Deacon a nice bat she clearly doesn’t need any more which they proceed to swing around with all the finesse of a really drunk person trying to hit a moving target. So, badly. The more raiders their group take out, the more that crawl out of the woodwork like radroaches. Deacon’s vision is stained red with all the blood everywhere, along with literally every other part of their body by the feel of it. The last time that had happened-

The world overlays itself, fading out the edges, and the bodies on the ground become familiar faces. Sunny. Mr. Sandman. Jazz. Tommy Whispers. King. Barbara. Barbara. Barbara. Barbara-

An overlarge hand grabs their arm again, and Deacon is jerked back to the present. All the raiders are dead and the lovebirds are staring in something like horror at them and Strong. This isn’t even the worst either of them could do, but they don’t know that and Deacon would like to try and keep it that way.

\-----------

Finding Vadim leads them to more raiders and like Asgard calling down the Valkyries, Cait and Piper join the bloodbath. If Cait is here, then Maccready and Curie should also be here, but they aren’t and Deacon can only spare so much energy being worried right now. Maccready is a sniper. He’s probably just…sniping.

Or not, as Piper tells Strong when the last raider falls and Vadim is free to be frog-marched back to his brother’s wrath.

“He and the girl with him stayed behind to get food. Didn’t catch her name in all the-“ Piper gestures around herself meaningfully.

“That’s Curie,” Cait tells her. Piper’s eyes nearly bug out.

“Wait! Wait! What? So, she’s a…” She glances around hurriedly and leans in. “A synth?”

“Dunno. Don’t care. Ask Deacon, he’s the “robot whisperer”.”

The assessing look Piper gives Deacon reminds them that the last time the two of them talked they’d been rather successfully trying to drown themself in a bottle of Bobrov’s Best.

“You still “not drunk”?” She asks, and honestly Deacon doesn’t know why Piper loves asking questions she already knows the answer to so much.

“Maybe take a break, or whatever,” she’d said back in the bar just before this whole mess started. Which had been so hilarious coming from the patron saint of workaholics everywhere that Deacon couldn’t help but laugh in her face over it. “Do your people never give you guys any time off?”

“We rest when we’re dead,” Deacon tells the Piper of now, turning away to try and wipe off the worst of the gore from their disguise. It’s probably the most honest they’ve been in a while.

_\--------_

_[Several hours earlier…]_

“It’s Travis, you see,” Vadim tells them, giving the empty bar around them a conspiratorial look. “His personality, it gets on my nerves. I be needing someone to….take him out.”

“Like on a date or with a sniper rifle?” Deacon quips, taking a long swig from the bottle the bartender passes him. “Cause those are two very separate things with very different prices.”

“We’re not killing Travis!” Piper protests. Her hands slam down onto the counter hard enough to startle the man of the hour himself awake from his drunken stupor at the other end. “Vadim! What the hell? How could you even consider that?”

“You have listened to radio lately, yes?”

Deacon chuckles, listing to the side and nearly falling off the stool. Luckily, Strong is sitting at their other side. The super mutant looks bored with the whole conversation, staring hungrily at the Pie-o-Matic by the door. Breaking the glass would be one way to win that damn pie slice, though it’d get them both kicked out for sure. Chugging down the rest of the bottle quickly, Deacon slams it down onto the counter.

“The point, Vadim,” they order, hoping to get the ball rolling on this whole honey pot assassination, or whatever the fuck it is Vadim wants done to Travis. Deacon should probably be paying more attention.

“Ah, yes. Yes. It was just little joke. But Travis is be needing some help, I think. A way to say, boost him up.”

“Uh, huh,” Piper agrees skeptically. “And how exactly do ya plan on doing that?”

Which is about the exact moment the raiders burst in.

“This has got to be the stupidest, most insane-!“ Piper shouts, ducking a bottle to the head. “Idiotic! Stupidest-!”

“You said that twice,” Deacon calls from their spot lounged back against the bar. They’d switched out from beer to a bottle of vodka about three rants ago and were well on their way to being able to fly if the weightless feeling in their body is any indication.

“Are you gonna just sit there?”

“Yep.” They punctuate the word with a long gulp, lowering the bottle only long enough to grin in the face of Piper’s obvious disgust. One of the raiders leaps onto her back, sending them both crashing to the ground in a flurry of curses. Deacon very helpfully breaks the now empty vodka bottle over his head.

Across the room, Travis is squaring off with the assumed leader of the pack and losing badly by the looks of it. Thank God, Scarlett is there to back him up with her broom, beating the raider with it until she goes down under their combined lack of skill.

And that’s the end of it, or it was supposed to be, but in the chaos of the battle, the raiders seemed to have forgotten their cue to get out.

“Classic Vadim,” Deacon sighs, pulling out their gun and wondering just where the man himself had gotten off to. “Gotta drag everyone else into his shit.”

\---------

“I’m just saying, maybe you should slow down a bit? Maybe take a break, or whatever,” Piper tries during clean-up, and Deacon can’t help but laugh. The worried look on the snoop’s face deepens which is the exact opposite of what anybody needs right now (but especially Deacon). “Do your people ever give you off time? I mean, if it’s bad enough to have you pulling a Maccready, then maybe-“

“You don’t know what I’m like usually,” Deacon cuts her off. “Maybe I’m a total lush on my off-time.”

“You’d have to actually have “off-time” first.”

Deacon shrugs, using his whole upper body like he’s seen Piper do before. Her eyes narrow. Unfortunately, what the snoop lacks in common-fucking-sense she makes up for in pure stubborn tenacity. Makes her a brilliant reporter, but an awful person to be around.

“Is it Blue?”

Fucking bullet right to the goddamned heart of the matter. Deacon really hates this woman sometimes. Before they can say anything, she’s plowing ahead like some sort of precision voodoo specialist seeing just how deep they can drive that nail in.

“We’re all worried about her, y’know? But Blue’s a tough one. It’s gonna take more than a few over-sized monsters to take her out. ‘Specially with that Danse guy backing her up.”

Deacon sets his bottle down harder than intended, cracking the bottom slightly. Maybe he should cut back a little after all. “Thought she was taking Strong. Big man’s been in a snit about it for weeks.”

They both turn to watch Strong drag another raider body across the bar floor and into the back under the careful direction of Yefim. Whatever happens to them after is between the mutant and God, the elder Bobrov had said looking only faintly ill at the thought. Gotta have a strong stomach to deal with all the bullshit this bar sees. Probably why the Third Rail is run by a robot.

“I think maybe it was a last minute switch-up?” Piper hurries to suggest, as if finally sensing the landmine she is all-but tripping over. “Blue didn’t tell me much, except that something came up.”

She starts to shrug, catches herself, and glares at Deacon, who smiles back brightly.

“Like what? Danse’s dick?” Okay, yep. Definitely time to cut themself off. Luckily, Piper’s already switched out their whiskey for a cola when she thought Deacon wasn’t looking. Joke’s on her though. Deacon’s always looking.

They take a long sip, staring her directly in the eyes to make a point, and the long low whistle Piper lets out in response makes it real hard not to chuck the damn bottle at a wall. Or maybe they’d just dump it over her head.

“Y’know, Dee, I’ve seen a lot of looks on you,” she drawls. “But jealousy? That’s a new one.”

Deacon really hates this woman.

Luckily, they’re saved from having to think of a retort by the sudden entrance of half-undressed and frantic Scarlett who informs them all that Vadim has been kidnapped by the very same group of raider’s he’d hired to trash his bar.

“Of fucking course he was,” Deacon sighs, leaning over the counter to grab another bottle. “I refuse to deal with this sober.”

Piper eyes the label, looking like she wants to argue, but Deacon is already dragging Strong out the door.

_\-------_

_[And another several hours before All That…]_

Getting Strong past DC security is almost too easy. None of the guards spare the dolled up mutant more than a second glance and a few even greeted them with a strained politeness that makes Deacon want to laugh hysterically.

The sour expression on their “Great-Aunt Myrtle’s” face is nearly enough to send them over on its own. Even cast in shadow by the biggest sunhat they’d been able to borrow out of Nora’s collection and framed by Deacon’s favorite blonde wig (“The one that makes you look like a young Debbie Reynolds,” Patches had said like Deacon should know who that is), Strong’s expression still screams murder almost as loudly as his usual battle-cry. Which is perfect for the pissed-off old lady look Deacon had been going for.

“Maccready really does have a type, huh?” Deacon mutters, amused despite themself. “Though, somehow I never imagined even his crazy ass would go for this sorta thing.”

Not that Deacon spent a lot of time thinking about Maccready’s sex life. Hell, they’d spent the last two years actively avoiding thinking about the kid at all and would gladly have continued down that trail were it not for their apparently mutual inability to say no to a very pretty person in a very tight vault suit.

This seems to be a common weakness across the entire country, which Deacon should be immune to considering they themself used to BE a pretty person in a very tight vault suit. Or well, maybe not pretty, but, like, relatively attractive? In the right lighting? They’d never been kicked out of bed for their looks at the very least.

“Nobody talk too much,” Strong grumbles, effectively yanking Deacon out of his ramblings and back to the present. “Even when nobody else listening.”

“Hey, you try spending forty years locked in a vault with only a box of hand-puppets for company, pal.”

“Pass. Strong already regret life being _here_.”

Deacon lets out a startled laugh, grinning up at the mutant. “Yeah, well, I promised you a good time, for your trouble, didn’t I?”

“Nobody promise Strong shovel.”

“No, no, no, big guy. The shovel is for if you hurt Maccready. The good time is something else entirely. Near entirely.”

The sigh Strong heaves as they make their way over to Publick Occurrences is loud enough to catch several people’s attention, but nobody starts screaming so Deacon figures they’re still safe. Probably.

“Don’t worry, Strong. Just gotta pick something up from the better Wright sister. Then we can get to the real party.”

The real party being whatever the fuck Vadim had told Arturo to tell Deacon to bring back-up for. Hopefully nothing too crazy, but its Vadim, so who knows. Deacon’s kind of hoping the man just wants to get drunk and reminisce about the good old days they both know never existed. They could use a good drink or two after-

_“I hate liars most of all.”_

The sheer betrayal in Patches eyes had been like a punch straight to the gut. Deacon had let themself become too compromised. The sheer amount of damage control they’re having to do to fix this shit is enough to make anyone want to throw out their ten month sobriety chip. Des is going to murder him when she finds out.

Des is the reason he’s in this mess. Follow around the vault dweller, she’d said. Get on her good side so we can use her as a pawn in our grand scheme, she said. Never mind that Deacon themself was the one to basically deliver that windfall on a silver platter to the Railroad’s doorstep. Never mind that she hadn’t meant for Deacon to actually fall for their target.

So, really this is all their own fault, like pretty much everything else that has ever gone wrong in Deacon’s life. Might as well hit the self-destruct button while they’re at it.

But first, they had a boon to cash in. Maccready better make him the fucking best maid of man-honor at his and Strong’s wedding for all this. It was only fair, after all.

_\----------_

_[And even longer before that…]_

“Got married at the chapel up in Diamond City when we found out she was pregnant,” Maccready explains, face bright red and trying to hide it behind his scarf. “I mean, seemed like the thing to do since we’ve already been together for basically forever already.”

“And plan to be for many years more!” Lucy chirps, throwing an arm around him to peck his cheek happily. “We even got our picture taken to commemorate the whole thing.”

“Well, shit, I gotta see that,” whoever Deacon had been at the time drawls, giving his favorite newlywed old married couple a teasing grin. They turn to each other, exchanging a long look before smiling sheepishly.

“Yeah, we uh…forgot to get a copy,” Maccready explains, and Not-Yet-Deacon laughs hard enough to fall off their chair.

These kids will be the death of them, seriously.

\---------

_[And now back to our regularly scheduled present…]_

“You don’t do anything by halves, huh?” Deacon says, holding onto Strong’s arm to keep from toppling over out of the sheer exhaustion as they trudge back toward Diamond City. “And neither does Maccready if he can help it. Just…remember that, okay?”

“Strong already promise not hurt Puny Gunner. Strong not knowing what more Nobody want.”

“Well, you could call him by his name, at least.”

They lapse into silence, watching the couples ahead of them alternate between mooning over their respective partners and chew Vadim out for the shit he pulled. Piper is winding up for The Big Rant, and Deacon’s encroaching hangover wishes she would maybe take her voice down a few decibels. Otherwise, their party continues along smoothly. So smoothly that Deacon almost forgets he is in the middle of a conversation until Strong restarts it.

“Mack Ree Dee…worry about Nobody too,” the big guy says. It’s an assurance that Deacon will deny needing until the literal grave. Loudly and with feeling just as soon as they can work up any sort of real emotion without wanting to vomit.

“Yeah, yeah. Worries about how he can get a bullet into my head fast enough, maybe. That was a good attempt by the way.”

“Nobody needing be shutting up now,” Strong declares, shoving the wig he’d yanked off during the fight onto Deacon’s head. It helps block out the light, so they leave it be.

Danny Sullivan takes one look at Piper’s face, and opens the gate without issue. They all trudge down the stairs, splitting off for their respective destinations, and Deacon heads off into the stands to hunt out the clothing they’d stashed up their years before. In the back reflection of their sunglasses, they see Maccready hurrying over to check on Strong and Cait, sparing Deacon a questioning glance all their own.

The photo they'd paid Nat to find burns in their breast pocket with the feeling of it. Attachments are a weakness, but maybe even Deacon can make a few exceptions.

They really need to talk to Nora.

(If she'll let them.)


End file.
